Taking its departure from Norbert von Hellingrath’s interpretation of the significance of Rousseau for Friedrich Hölderlin, the following paper argues, through a close reading of the poem “Rousseau,” that Hölderlin, contra Hellingrath, conceives of his relation to Rousseau in philological rather than prophetic terms. Looking closely at the complexities of Hölderlin’s manuscript while contrasting the philological approaches of Freidrich Beißner’s Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe and D. E. Sattler’s Frankfurter Ausgabe, I demonstrate that an explicitly philological moment is inscribed into the text of the poem itself, and that it addresses its reader as a specifically philological reader, while at the same time seeking to establish a “friendship of words” with Rousseau’s prophetic utterance.